A horrible life.

YASSER ARAFAT was responsible for years of murder and bloodshed, for civil war, for the hijacking of aircraft and other acts of terror, for gun-running, for embezzlement and blackmail and bribery. His racist fantasies have polluted far and wide.

Lying was his one great skill. He was able to persuade the watching world that his long career of crime was actually a national liberation movement. Aman of his time, he had understood that the manufacture of the Palestinians into a Third World and anti-imperialist cause was certain to win him general applause. And it proved so. The Soviet Union took him up, and then the United Nations, the Saudi royals, other Arab dictators (including Saddam Hussein), and the European Union too. The more he urged on jihad and killing, and the more money he stole to finance corruption and death, the louder the acclaim he received. In an episode from the theater of the absurd, he received the Nobel Peace Prize for signing a treaty that he had no intention of keeping.

The historian Lord Acton once observed that behind every despot comes an apologist with a sponge. A BBC reporter wept to see Arafat leave his West Bank headquarters on his final flight to a military hospital in Paris. The Guardian compared him to Moses, and the thriller writer John Le Carre described him as "cuddly," recalling how once he had put his hand on Arafat's chest to feel the Palestinian heart. CNN called him a "revolutionary romantic figure comparable to Ho Chi Minh and Nelson Mandela," a comparison that ought to earn the latter substantial damages for libel. Jacques Chirac praised Arafat as a man of "courage and conviction," and some French municipalities are considering naming streets for him. The U.N. flew its flag at half mast, an honor it withheld from Ronald Reagan earlier this year.

Such confused and sickly sentimentality reveals the moral degradation of the age. These and the many other apologists are sponging away the record as though crime committed on a large enough scale is worthy of praise and commemoration.

The damage Arafat did to the entire Arab world is irreparable. He and his men killed huge numbers of other Arabs in Jordan and Lebanon, and ensured that Palestinians could no longer lead settled lives anywhere, expelled by the hundreds of thousands from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia as a consequence of Arafat's misjudgments. He did succeed, however, in building a ghastly stereotype of the Palestinian and the Arab as an unreasoning thug for whom terror replaces argument. The standing invitation to Israel to commit suicide only led to more and more pointless deaths of both Jews and Arabs.

In reality, Palestinians were people in need of justice and peace, and they never asked to be fodder for Arafat's cause. He talked of giving them a state, but then refused to take the measures necessary for doing so. Instead of the humdrum peacetime business of administration and governance, he taught them to kill and to hate, so that they became victims with no chance of escaping their victimhood. The many Palestinians who mobbed Arafat's coffin before burial had evidently internalized the lying of decades. Their future depends on recognizing as soon as possible how Arafat cheated them of livelihood and statehood, indeed of hope itself.